SPECIALISES IN

Tanchoi Butidaar weaving, a refined silk-on-silk Banarasi technique in which minute butis are woven across a smooth satin ground using several coloured weft threads. Unlike the zari-heavy brocades most commonly associated with Banaras, Tanchoi builds its richness primarily through colour, texture and repetition. The pattern is formed at the same time as the cloth. The additional wefts remain bound into the ground rather than being embroidered later or left in long, loose floats. The result is light, supple and extraordinarily precise.

THE PLACE

Jaitpura, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh. One of Banaras’s old weaving neighbourhoods, where silk is created through an entire chain of local skills: designing, dyeing, winding, warping, card-making, loom-setting and weaving. Much of this work belongs to households and family networks rather than a single central factory. Here, weaving is not simply an occupation carried out behind a workshop door. The loom lives within the architecture of the home, and its rhythm becomes the rhythm by which the household measures its day.

THE AWARD

National Award for Handloom Weavers, 2012. The award record lists Sh. Nurul Hasan under the Varanasi entry and names the recognised work precisely: Tanchoi Butidaar Saree. Conferred through the handloom awards programme of the Ministry of Textiles, Government of India, the honour recognised mastery of a particular and technically exacting weave, rather than Banarasi silk in general. In Tanchoi Butidaar, a lapse in tension, colour order or motif sequence can disturb the rhythm of the entire saree. The award marks the command required to keep that rhythm unbroken.

THE WEAVE

Tanchoi is woven with a single or double silk warp and multiple coloured silk wefts, often between two and five, to create intricate patterning on a satin or sateen ground. Because the patterning wefts are interlaced with the foundation while the fabric is being woven, the surface remains smooth and the motifs appear almost embossed without making the saree excessively heavy.

The most widely repeated history traces the technique to nineteenth-century Surat, where Parsi weavers learned a Chinese-influenced method of silk weaving. By the 1940s, the technique had been adopted in Varanasi, where Banarasi weavers expanded its vocabulary of flowers, birds, paisleys, creepers and elaborate all-over patterns. Banaras did not merely inherit Tanchoi. It taught the weave a new visual language.

THE BUTIDAAR

Butidaar describes a field animated by small, individual motifs such as flowers, leaves, paisleys or geometric forms, repeated across the body of the saree. In Nurul Ji’s specialism, each buti is carried by coloured silk wefts and woven directly into the structure of the cloth. Nothing is printed on top. Nothing is embroidered after the saree leaves the loom.

The difficulty lies not only in weaving one perfect buti but in repeating it hundreds of times with exact spacing, clear edges and an even pulse from the first inch of the saree to the last. The eye sees a constellation of motifs. The loom sees a sequence that cannot lose its place.

THE MAKING

The work begins long before the shuttle moves. Fine two-fold mulberry silk, locally known as katan, is prepared for both the warp and the weft. The design is first drawn and resolved on a grid, then translated into the lifting sequence of the loom, traditionally through jacquard cards or related patterning systems. Preparing those cards and setting the loom can take almost as much concentration as the weaving itself.

The warp is stretched under exact tension. The different weft colours are wound separately and arranged in sequence. With every pass of the shuttle, selected warp threads rise and another fine line of the pattern is formed. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the butis emerge from the satin ground. Each saree can take more than a month to make.